Chapter 12
Luca
It started, harmlessly, with the smell on his clothes — Luca had finally asked — and ended somewhere neither of them had planned to go.
Matej is explaining the Brevibacterium linens — the moisture it needs, the way the spores would move if given the chance, colonising everything they touched.
One wheel can teach you that the hard way.
He’s using his hands. He does that when he talks about this, Luca has noticed.
The rest of the time his hands are still.
“So that smell,” Luca says. “I caught it on you the first week and couldn’t name it. That was this.”
“That was this.”
“I thought something had died.”
“Something had. Several times over. That’s the point.”
Luca asks about the cultures. Matej tells him about the clabber, the backsplash whey, what it means to use the same living starter across batches — the continuity of it, the way each wheel carries something of every wheel before it.
He says it plainly, without ornament, and Luca listens properly: without already composing the sentence he’ll write later.
The continuity of it lands somewhere he hadn’t expected.
Each wheel of cheese carries something of every wheel before it.
He thinks about his own work. Pieces that run in a magazine for a month and then don’t.
Nothing that accumulates. Nothing that a person could hold in their hands in twenty years and say: this came from him.
He doesn’t follow the thought. Matej is still talking.
And he is good at it. That is the thing Luca keeps snagging on.
Half of it he loses, the Latin and the chemistry and the number with the question mark beside it, and he gives up holding on to it and just lets the man talk.
This is not a hobby explained kindly to a guest. It is the real thing, and Matej did not plan to start and now can’t quite stop, reaching for the next part before he’s done with the last. A week ago Luca had him down as warm, steady, good with his hands, the man who fixes his own windows and knows a fact about Roman concrete.
All of that is still true. It turns out to sit on top of this: someone who has been thinking, hard and alone, about something most people never look at once.
He wants the glasses back on him. He doesn’t ask why.
He has stopped wanting to be anywhere else, and it does not occur to him to find that strange.
What Matej is saying is that the wheel isn’t finished when it leaves his hands.
It has to sit. Months of it, in the cold and the dark, left alone to become what it’s going to become.
That part can’t be rushed and can’t be faked.
He says it like he says everything, flat, no weight on it.
“The place is in it,” he says. “Same as wine.”
Luca knows the sentence. He has written some version of it about other people’s bottles for years. He has never heard it said about cheese, this far east of the line where the serious things are supposed to stop.
“So it just sits,” Luca says. “Where? In there?” He tips his head at the little room off the kitchen, the one he’s only now understood is where any of this happens.
Matej shakes his head. “It needs a cave.”
Luca waits for the rest of it. There isn’t any. “A cave,” he says. “Who has a cave?”
“I do.” Matej says it like another man might admit to owning a shed.
Luca rebuilds the picture. He’d had Matej down for the kitchen, the little room, the wheels on their boards.
Now there’s a hole in a hillside somewhere with cheese in it.
He pictures something modest, a dip in a rock face, a door set into a slope.
It moves the man a quarter-turn in his head and settles.
“And where did you learn it,” he asks.
“The Jura. In another cave. Comté.” Matej turns his glass without drinking. “Nobody does it here. Not with cow’s milk. The tradition runs the other way, west of the border. That’s why I do it here.”
He finds he wants to see it — the hollow in the hill where all this happens. Not for a piece. Just to stand in the cold dark where the cheese takes on the place.
At some point Luca mentions the Collio. The ponca soil, how the border cut through vineyards that had been continuous for centuries. Matej asks a question Luca doesn’t expect, one that requires real thought.
They look at each other.
“You know this,” Luca says.
“My grandfather knew people on your side of the border. It’s a small region.”
Luca says nothing. The phrase settles in him at a slight angle, closer than expected. He doesn’t follow it. He looks at the window.
Outside, the light has gone. Neither of them noticed.
Luca looks back. “How long have we been sitting here.”
Matej considers the candle on the table. It has burned down by a third.
“A while,” he says.
Matej
He finds Luca on the kitchen counter.
Not sitting at the table, not at the desk upstairs — on the counter, back against the cupboard, laptop balanced on his knees, one leg folded under him and the other hanging off the edge.
He has a coffee going cold beside him and three tabs open and the expression of a man who has been in this position for long enough that it no longer feels unusual to him.
Matej stops in the doorway.
“There’s a table,” he says.
“I know.”
“Chairs. Multiple.”
“The light’s better here.”
Matej looks at the window. The light is identical. He doesn’t say this.
He goes to the stove, puts the kettle on. Behind him he can hear Luca typing, fast and uninterrupted, the sound of a thread found and held.
“Perching chicken,” Matej says, not quite to him.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He makes coffee. Luca keeps typing. The counter suits him. Matej does not look into why he finds this less irritating than it should be.
Luca
They are on the second glass of the evening — the brandy from the cellar — when Matej says, without preface:
“The smell of rain on dry ground. It has a name.”
Luca sets his glass down.
“Petrichor,” Matej continues. “From the Greek. Petra — stone. Ichor — the fluid in the veins of the gods. I heard it somewhere. Forgot it. Looked it up.”
“When.”
“Three years ago.”
Luca looks at him. “You looked up the smell of rain three years ago and you’re telling me now.”
“You’re the first person who would find it interesting.”
He picks up his glass. Looks at the window.
Luca is quiet.
“What else,” he says. Matej looks at him.
“What else have you been carrying around,” Luca says. “That you haven’t had anyone to tell.”
A silence. Someone deciding how seriously to take a question.
“Did you know the technical term for the fear of long words is hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.”
“That’s not —” Luca stops. “That’s deliberate.”
“Yes.”
Luca starts laughing too, and Matej watches him, and outside the yard settles into its low late-evening quiet, and neither of them refills the glass for a while because neither of them moves.
After a while Luca picks up his glass. Drinks. He has not, he realises, thought about what he was drinking. Not the provenance, not the year, not what he would say about it. He has just been drinking it.
His father would have said something about that. He is not sure if it would have been a compliment.